[Spooks] Text for Numbers Station Article

Tom Norris r390a at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 3 18:14:51 EDT 2004


In violation of all US and foreign copyright laws, here is the
text of that article with source properly attributed.

TN

washingtonpost.com >Arts & Living >Music

The Shortwave And the Calling
For Akin Fernandez, Cryptic Messages Became Music To His Ears

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page C01

In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin 
Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. 
It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and 
the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an 
otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie 
music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over 
his life.

Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, 
caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the 
Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news 
from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops 
when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, 
reading out numbers.

No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but 
numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals 
disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not 
just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he 
hears.

"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless 
voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four. 
Zero nine zero one four."

Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male, 
others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a 
broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few 
bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then 
come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each 
night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.

At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates 
with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the 
radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits 
into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's 
the comedic payoff?

Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims 
they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations 
don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did. 
Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter 
on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has 
solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every 
other sound on the planet.

What's with the numbers?

Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, 
and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also 
brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually 
earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle 
with the acclaimed band Wilco.

Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't 
stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an 
obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he 
discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes 
to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.

That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just 
listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning, 
jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps 
a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue 
about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave 
his house for a week.

"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get 
immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to 
listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."

The Secret Sounds

A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's 
the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born 
parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was 
15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real. 
More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his 
clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to 
discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.

Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the 
way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and 
ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for 
numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his 
ears.

And the radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was 
beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who 
argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle 
of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our 
musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes. 
This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert 
with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a 
melee: performers against the audience.

"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez 
says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another 
level of beauty to the music."

One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to 
fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that 
swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that 
literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their 
services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards 
glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's 
Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez 
would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards 
off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he 
published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."

"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."

Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of 
his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality, 
if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The 
Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could 
occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the 
background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One 
starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read 
words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making 
inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound 
life-and-death urgent.

While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all 
over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down 
the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry 
looked like this:

Sept 6 '93

Freq Time Signal

6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice

Station starts with beeps, then

GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count

 From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!

And message!! [expletive] Hell!!

There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.

"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really 
strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever 
heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could 
be for anything. There's nothing like it."

To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial-Discs, which 
by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops 
selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of 
wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting 
Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it 
from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it 
in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the 
stations were no joke.

"They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl 
reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a 
person with a poisoned umbrella."

Mission: Indecipherable

Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need 
instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to 
risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail 
(traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you 
do?

One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave 
radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only 
you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way 
chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy 
theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted 
ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound 
low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly 
cockamamie.

"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message," 
says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of 
cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen, 
which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."

The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's 
known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that 
is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use -- 
some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one 
of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar 
of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in 
London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and 
transcribed a message sent via shortwave.

For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new 
questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and 
what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government 
official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge 
this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that 
if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It 
didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable, 
or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more 
Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. 
British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting 
secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.

"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this 
money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations 
represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live 
in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little 
sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your 
government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they 
keeping."

If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of 
his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his 
super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he 
was going through and he comes up empty.

Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened 
and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a 
cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.

"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to 
hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over 
the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it. 
But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me 
miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine 
might understand what he's talking about."

At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers 
habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had 
enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How 
did he do it?

"The Conet Project," he says.

The Leading Edge of Rock

In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find 
anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project." 
( Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.") 
Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the 
world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus 
a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography 
-- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling 
bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had 
into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.

"I wanted it to be perfect," he says. "I didn't know what it would 
do, if it would just sit in boxes, because nobody had done anything 
like this before. But it was obvious to me that it had to be done."

This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel 
you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you 
everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few 
head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies, 
modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the 
last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that 
he'd rather not discuss.

"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."

That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly 
acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up 
in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for 
the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums 
such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's 
owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and 
totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register 
that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought 
a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No. 
386.

"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a 
co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of 
what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think 
it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's 
more than that."

Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely 
forbidden: Maybe the government doesn't want you to hear this . And 
your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of 
Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the 
"chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What 
could be more frightening than "chatter"?

"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive 
thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It 
feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. 
That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in 
part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything 
that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate 
America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now 
mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a 
measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find 
something that delivers the frisson of the margins.

Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label 
released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance 
music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on 
the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the 
only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that 
rock-and-roll has been dead for years.

"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been 
marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the 
production. These people are copying their fathers' record 
collections.

"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist 
would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted 
yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a 
band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."

So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn 
new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?

Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now 
boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the 
group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts 
as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody 
evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it 
builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the 
noise:

"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."

It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio 
Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. 
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- 
it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music 
critics -- and it sold decently, too.

At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and 
co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now 
question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in 
the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. 
Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted 
corner of the musical canvas.

It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier 
isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some 
point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation 
in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie 
McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. 
The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system 
equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second 
album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's 
redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.

"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. 
How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward 
without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake?

On the Record

Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they 
never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop, 
and in 2002 Fernandez sued.

For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable 
versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to 
download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But 
Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of 
his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he 
should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask 
nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the 
right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free 
of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in 
those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and 
discovers that he's all alone.

Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was 
no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that 
obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically 
altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the 
law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court, 
saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June. 
The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000 
to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that 
sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.

Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to 
grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising 
four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco 
loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez 
didn't do that.

"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of 
guy who goes on vacation," he says.

How about a new car?

"Absolutely not," he says.

Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The 
Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart 
at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store 
has already sold 120 more copies.

"Conet," of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the 
point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it's in 
the Library of Congress, because it's in the British Library and 
because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran 
into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson 
acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used 
for espionage.

"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are," the 
spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted 
by the release of "Conet." "People shouldn't be mystified by them. 
They're not, shall we say, for public consumption."

To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable 
brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company



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